Virtual Server 2005 best practice in production

[jseptor1]

I'm working on a project with a customer who is considering using virtual server 2005 to cluster (virtual machines on separate virtual servers) some of their servers to increase fault tolerance and maximize their use of resources on some pretty powerful servers.

I'm curious if anyone is actually using VS2005 in a production environment in this manner, and what your experiences have been like with this.

I know we should keep at least the PDC on its own physical server, and have a SAN for most of the storage anyway. We would be looking at maybe using SQL, Exchange, and file servers with some type of cluster / failover between the virtual machines on separate servers.

I'm also curious if I'm mistaken to say that you can take a virtual server image off computer1, and put the image on computer2 (both running virtual server) and use the same image with different hardware under the hood? This seems like it would be very appealing if that is in fact the case, especially taking into account the use of a SAN for the majority of the data.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[ntinlin]

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=320220

"Support policy for Exchange Server 2003 running on hardware virtualization software"

As you can see MS don't support virtual clustering for XC.

On your last part that is one of the major advantages of virtualisation. The underlying hardware doesn't really matter since Virtual Server is always presenting the same hardware set to the virtual OS.

John Howard of MS's blog is very good on the pros and cons of VS.

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/default.aspx

Cheers
Neill